The Circus Comes to Town--WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen (Algonquin Books, 2007).
Reviewed by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com. EMail: [email protected]

In our American youth-worshiping culture, Jacob Jankowski, the narrator of Sara Gruen’s WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, turns out to be the most engaging male character appearing in many a moon. For Jacob is a direct lineal descendant of that ever-young American hero, Huck Finn.

But time has turned Jacob into Huck-grown-old, incarcerated in a nursing facility, not a “home,” run by the Aunt Sallies of the world. Jacob can’t stand to see himself in the mirror. He is “ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other.” He’s not quite sure. Yet Jacob’s memories of his youth with the 25th-rate, squalid Benzini Brothers circus still haunt—and define--him.

Unlike Huck, Jacob didn’t willingly “light out for the territory.” At 21, just as he was finishing his veterinary studies at Cornell, he lost his carefree collegiate existence. His parents’ deaths, killed in an auto accident, left him penniless after their struggles to pay his college tuition.

Paralyzed by shock and loss, Jacob can’t write a word in his blue books during his final exams. He runs away. Luck, bad and good, throws him on the squalid Benzini circus train.

On the train, he finds a new, sordid world of mostly downtrodden, lost, lonely isolatos barely holding themselves together with “hooch.” Uncle Al, a money-hungry, fraudulent circus impresario, and August Rosenbluth, a vicious animal trainer and paranoid schizophrenic, rule this gang of life’s losers with an iron fist. They underpay or don’t pay, casually beat—and sometimes kill—the roustabouts, grifters, workers, and even performers with brutal efficiency. Because the animals bring in the “rubes” who pay money to see their circus acts, Al and August don’t kill them. That would be too expensive. They save their gratuitous cruelty for torturing the mangy underfed, chained creatures. Only human beings are “redlighted,” “tossed” and murdered under a handy train trestle.

Attached to the circus as a vet, Jacob and his fortunes wax and wane, mostly wane. He falls in love with the beautiful animal trainer, Marlena, who is married to the insanely jealous August. He trains Rosie, an apparently stupid bull elephant, by giving her directions in Polish.

When the animals stampede from their open cages (Gruen never tells you how the cages happened to be open), disaster strikes the circus and frees the ill-assorted crew. Marlena, Jacob, Rosie, Marlena’s 11 horses, Bobo, the loving chimp, and Queenie, the murdered midget’s dog escape. Marlena finds jobs, a seven-year performing hitch with Ringling Brothers. After that, Jacob gets his veterinarian’s license and they all, elephant, chimp, horses, and five children move onto a suburban life that “all zipped by.” Ruefully, Jacob recalls, “One minute Marlena and I were up to our eyeballs, and next thing we knew the kids were borrowing the car and fleeing the coop for college. And now,” Jacob mourns, here I am. In my nineties and alone.”

Gruen, like Jacob, spends most of the story on the Benzini circus, where Jacob learned to grow up, love, and assume responsibility. The stark contest between the circus’s freaky illusion and its terrible, dog-eat-dog reality consumes Jacob’s tale.

Yet although Gruen obviously did her circus homework, the gritty piling up of fights, the brutality for the sake of brutality becomes tedious in many places. The circus train bumps against too many hazards. The territory holding the young Jacob is too mean. His final flight is too easy--as it is in the end.

For Gruen draws parallels between the imprisonment in circus life and Jacob's imprisonment in the nursing home. The powerful condescend wherever he goes.

In the end, Gruen saves the day. She inserts classical photographs of old-time circuses that lend reality to this tale of circus life devoted to fostering illusion among the rubes—and in an old man’s memories. Better yet, she gives us a fairy-tale ending that satisfies the reader’s desire for illusion much as the circus served the country rubes’ yearning for a better life amid the Depression’s despair. Caviling aside, who could ask for anything more?